Ralph Lauren / Fall 2012 RTW

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You have never seen the likes. At Ralph Lauren, the curtain was raised on the show, so to speak, by the strains of the theme music to Downton Abbey. All of a sudden, the entire audience was transported, misty-eyed, to watching PBS at 9 p.m. on a Sunday night, not the Ralph Lauren show at 10:00 a.m. on a Thursday morning. Before Downton Abbey, we had Gosford Park, and before Gosford Park, we had Ralph Lauren, whose achingly romantic and lovingly nuanced idea of grand English country living has had a cinematic sweep that could give Downton and Gosford a run for their pounds, shilling, and pence. That era and locale has been one of the mainstays of Lauren’s career, turning the shooting parties and the candlelit dinners under the family Gainsboroughs into tweeds and Fair Isles, jodhpurs and hacking jackets, bias-cut slips and ravishing beaded flapper dresses of yore into clothes that manage to speak to the past yet also live and breathe in the here and now—and all around the globe, at that.

All of these elements were in Ralph Lauren’s show. From the opening looks that married snappy masculine tailoring (blazers, trenches) in herringbone and houndstooth wools and Fair Isle sweaters in wonderful and original color combinations (this Scot is qualified to weigh in on this) with lean pants; the roomier, relaxed, yet masculine line of the outer layer worn with something lean underneath taps into one of the key ideas about shape and form we’ve been seeing this week. What gave this an unexpected twist was the use of ocelot-print shearling in the mix, either for a casual, shrug-it-on coat, or as a scarf tucked into the neck of the sweater; a cool and easy and highly covetable styling trick that really caught the eye.

As the show progressed, events took a turn—by turns dark and dramatic and golden-hued and glamorous. (That certainly sounds like a Downton narrative arc.) Lauren made the use of black leather—another recurrent theme these past few days—for a pleated skirt sliced with sheer panels that were revealed when it moved, pairing it with a black sweater threaded with gold beads. But it was with some of the closing, long evening looks that he reached a crescendo—columnar black velvet beaded at the neck, an exquisite undulation of gold-lamé pleats—that could take you somewhere just as magical as any episode of a cult British TV show playing on a Sunday night.